“You’re right,” said Suzanne, the kind of woman healthy men dream of. “I’d probably buy it.”
“Suzanne! I want you to come back. I want you and James back! I’ll do anything!” There was no hint of insincerity in Lucien’s voice. “I can see clearly now!”
“Absolutely not.”
He knew she’d say that, but he was distracted with sudden wild and sourceless yearning that rode right over the predicted rejection.
“Can we just try?”
“Lucien, I really don’t think so. My famous optimism is gone. And let’s face it, you haven’t achieved a thing since you went back to Montana.”
“That I don’t believe.”
“Besides, I’m no longer optimistic enough to feel lonely.”
“You don’t have to feel lonely. We can try again.”
“What I’m saying is I don’t feel lonely.”
Lucien’s heart and groin ached, all the right signs. He’d done well to take to the phone. But even Lucien riding the long swell of revelation could see this one had gone nowhere fast.
“It’s still snowing!” he cried.
Another call yielded little more.
“You and me and James can have a beautiful life here. James could grow up on the ranch—”
“That ranch?”
“Yes …”
“Oh, Lucien.”
Upon thought, it seemed a little early for issuing invitations even to Suzanne and his boy. Suzanne was right, he didn’t have much of a record. But he went on feeling he could change that. He knew he had to.
Finally spring began to come, and with it, new merriness. New merriness sent Lucien down the road of vintage tequila; and that resulted in a hiatal hernia from throwing up. Sometimes now even well-chewed food seemed to get stuck before heading toward his stomach, a disconcerting thing. He’d read about well-off citizens choking on big steaks and dying in front of maître d’s, and he didn’t want to go that way. With his new merriness, he didn’t want to go at all.
He was so excited and, really, agitated that he ended up with his former companion Dee. They took a cooler filled with ice and drinks and snacks, wonderful things that she had made with her own hands, and went to the drive-in movie, a fine old concrete thing that stood in front of the great mountains of the wilderness, playing to an amazingly small parking area on a spring night. It was such an early-day drive-in that it should have been one of the primary artifacts, alongside the buffalo jumps and Calamity Jane’s favorite bar, of this good little town. When Lucien was learning to smoke, now among his most demeaning habits, he used to go up to the projectionist’s chamber. The projectionist, a woman in her sixties, would draw out the glowing carbon rods from the projector and light Lucien’s cigarette.
Now many years later he was parked again in this lonely spot in a row of less than twenty cars. We’ve put a bad hurt on this cooler, thought Lucien, and now it’s mostly gone. The car had become a very private place where Lucien went in and out of focus. He had long since quit trying to understand what Fred MacMurray was doing up on that screen, squinting down through his pipe smoke at a freckled redhead with a newsboy’s sack.
The engine was running to keep their naked bodies warm, and Lucien could feel its RPMs registering through the seat cover. “It’s too early to open a drive-in,” he said. The reason why they were sitting at opposite ends of the seat was that Lucien had learned that Dee was having her period, and he was discouraged. Now and again he would tear his eyes from Fred MacMurray and look quizzically at the small trailing white string, trying to think what to do. She was not a little disgusted by his squeamishness. He felt like a touchy town kid confronted by his first lusty country maiden. And it didn’t help when she indicated for him to come to her side, with the same gesture used by zoo bears asking for a peanut. Still, it was already clear he would have to come through.
He leaned over and cupped the heated weight of one breast. Then he kind of bounced over to her and got the string between his thumb and forefinger. At first it wouldn’t come loose; then it came all at once and hung between them like a rodent. She wrinkled her nose and pointed sharply at the window. Lucien gave it a toss, but somehow the string and the thing’s actual weight were such that it flew way too far and landed on the windshield of one of the other cars. Lucien stared over there in real fright. It was stuck right in the middle of the windshield. As Lucien watched, the wiper blade moved up and bumped it without moving it very much; the blade retreated and then moved upon it again, this time sliding it to the top of the windshield where, anyone could see, it was going to stay.
Then the door of the car opened up and a bruiser in a cowboy hat got out and began to look around. Lucien felt his organs shrink dramatically, an ancient prelude to flight. The big cowboy moved boldly from vehicle to vehicle staring into each one, quietly asking a few questions. When he was only one car away, Lucien felt he should engage the transmission. A moment later he shot away, spraying ancient drive-in gravel while the cowboy shouted, “I got my fiancée here! She don’t want to know about your little world!” And in a short time Lucien was tearing along, bare and alert, while the golden lights of his car lit up the canyon south. “This is the life!” he cried. “They can have that Fred MacMurray!” It was the first movie he’d seen in a year.
The next morning was another thing entirely, another day that began with the query, Where am I? This time it was the ranch. Immediately he began to remember the events of the previous night; now of course they were devoid of the verve that actually made them happen. Lucien felt the heat of shame start up the back of his neck and then consume his entire face with the burning, prickling agony of remorse. Back somewhere in Lucien was a residue of puritanism that surfaced on mornings like these which would convince some of his enemies that he did in fact pay in the end. Lying in bed, with late-morning light on him, he thought the veins in his hands were too prominent, and his scalp itched. His previously clever mouth was a cup of variegated scum; and his poor old dick was a grim souvenir of infamy and inconsideration. He shivered and pulled up the covers around his neck, a move which only revealed his bird dog and his feet. Now he hated his feet, which were white paddles. They were not the honest arched dusky feet of the world’s real people. They were the splayed white paddles of the superfluous. He staggered across the hall into the bathroom and sat down. His bowel movement was so shocking it sent his dog scurrying for cover as a blast of discolored water arced from his ass to the crockery. “What lucky girl will get me next?” he moaned aloud. When he made it to the sink and had an opportunity to stand before the mirror, he was not cheered. His face was colorless. His eyelashes seemed to be irregularly spaced. There were greenish-gray shadows in the bottom of every wrinkle and crease. When he pressed down on his teeth, one incisor seemed to send out a little red signal of meaningless pain. A guy ought to bag it, Lucien thought, right here. But who would feed Sadie? Who would rattle the vitamin-enriched kibble into the little sucker’s spun-metal bowl? Who would refill her water and run her in her roading harness off-season? Tears filled Lucien’s eyes. He knew she needed him, that no one else would remember her points and retrieves. They would take her for a brown and white cur with no master. It would be sadder and more sickening than Old Shep. How would Sadie watch me die? I suppose with a mixture of pride and dismay. At this thought, Lucien laughed miserably. More than anything, he wanted to grow up. But today he was going to do something about it.
Tompkins came down from the corner of Callender. He was wearing a herringbone topcoat with a velvet collar and a John B. Stetson hat. He used his cigarette to point out a streetside stairway to Lucien. They went up and opened the door at the top, going through a very ancient-looking brick wall. Inside was a simple dining room. Adjoined to it by a half door was a small kitchen, where a Chinese woman cooked. “I’ve got some fine sour-mash whiskey for us, Lucien.”
“I don’t care how it tastes so long as it kills brain cells and fucks up my memory.”
Wick m
ade two strong drinks at a sideboard and silently held the glasses over the half door until the Chinese woman filled them with ice. He brought them to the table and sat down.
“What is this place?”
“This is the dining room. Shitalmighty, I can’t eat like those people out there. I don’t believe in the afterlife. You have to believe in the afterlife to eat like those sumbitches.”
Lucien stared around at the walls of the tall room. It was painted an ocher color and had a ceiling fitted roundabout with hard pine molding. Someone had painted the ceiling a thrilling azure, and plummeting through this blue were all the fine hawks of the northern Rockies, all the common ones, anyway; and from the light fixture which served as a noon sun in this conceit, a terrific prairie falcon hurtled, its feathers scaling its earthward dive with martial brightness.
The Chinese woman came and put down some leek soup, some delicious pot stickers and a bowl of dry fried beef. Most of the light in the room came from the top of the tall transom windows; it was light from a high part of the sky and seemed to filter any life that surrounded the building. In such isolation, Lucien thought, one must decide upon things, accept the aerial quality of one’s situation.
“I called my wife.”
“She’s not your wife anymore.”
“I called Suzanne. She seems to have no interest in coming out here. At this time.”
“What’s there to come to?”
“I know.”
“Are you going to do anything about it?” Wick asked in a challenging tone.
“I’m going to start something tremendous,” Lucien retorted.
“What?”
“I don’t know, but I’ll be very proud of it.” In Lucien’s face was the glow and pride of a diving catch. It was important to snap Wick back just a little. “I’m going to set the world on fire.”
“Lucien, it’s me, Wick.”
“People will come from miles around,” he continued, trying to fuel the mood.
Wick stood up and looked upon Lucien with a lowered brow that seemed to say, I know you’ve got it in you. It was an artificial look. “I have to leave,” he said. “Believe this or not, I’ve got a client. Finish your lunch and don’t fuck the cook.”
9
It began to soak in. It soaked in faster than the Chinese food. Lucien headed for the bank, where he was strangely unspecific with a vice-president, who agreed that the ranch was valuable and the loan Lucien wanted would be well secured. Yet when Lucien said, “I just feel lost. I’m hoping heavy borrowing will create a useful crisis,” he saw the banker was lost too but unwilling to consider embezzlement or any of the other things that would restore the oxygen to his atmosphere. Even with his blow-dry shag haircut, the banker retained a hangdog face; and nothing on its surface really changed when Lucien said the following. “I know this is all based on you throwing me into the briar patch of usurious interest rates. But I just don’t see the thrill from your point of view, however it turns out. Not that I don’t appreciate it!” He waved the big check in gratitude and went back outside, where yet another unique sedan suddenly seemed to hold the absolute promise of a rocket ship or a bomb.
Before he started, he wanted to take another good look at the spring. He drove out on a highway interrupted by the tongues of old wheel-packed snow; he went up through his outbuildings, past the house, where Sadie leapt behind the front window. He made his way over the unnerving shalerock jeep road until he reached the spring. He didn’t get out. He just sat in the car and listened to the livestock report on the radio and viewed the rolling steam climbing from the great blue eye that had watched him from days gone by. Around the spring, the steam had mineralized the landscape, the branches of trees. Minerals, Lucien knew, were a big item. The spring was a deep penetration of warm moving water as full of goodness as amniotic fluid is to a developing infant. All I’ve got to do, he thought, the big check burning a hole in his pocket, is deliver the goods. He felt better already, monstrous almost.
They brought the buildings from near and far: a cavalry stable from the Missouri River housed the main pool. Evocative bentwood dude-ranch furniture from the twenties was arranged around the slate perimeters of the spring, concealing the old mud banks where Lucien had floundered away many a sorrow. Adjoined by a fragrant, carpentered cedar passage was an ancient way station found at Silver Star, Montana; here Lucien’s friend and chef Henchcliff prepared the meals that made him a regional legend. Then line shacks from the slopes of Kid Royal Mountain and the high pastures of Froze-to-Death were dismantled, moved and restored as the evocative cottages that housed chiefs of state, high-spirited young professionals, screaming mimis and the assorted preposterously well-off who drifted around the good places on a seasonal basis.
Mary Celeste had set up her enema therapy center in an old-time blacksmith’s shop, also connected to the spring; on its walls were loops and loops of glass tubing where the gastrointestinal burden of her clients flew by; she could tell booze from water, beets from a bleeding ulcer and bacterial diarrhea from bad cocaine. She had the mind of a native healer, and no sense of humor.
The landscaping was the original sage and juniper, divided by gravel walks. The parking lot was hidden in a draw and the airfield was on the low flat mesa where, as a boy, Lucien had seen the lost saddle horse with his father.
Old man McCourtney was the doorman, the shell-shocked Irishman with a mottled face. He wore English suits and indicated the front desk with a shaking hand. Since he looked too old and weak to fight, he made a perfect bouncer in the late evenings, preying on the remorse of drunks. Lucien had renewed their friendship at his father’s funeral, where he had requested no keening; McCourtney stood well off among the casual acquaintances, twitching. Lucien had had little to say at the time, as he gripped his mother just above the elbow and hoped for the best. At the funeral, Lucien said, “If you ever need me, call.” She never called.
Much trouble came to Lucien through his living in an area his friends wished to visit without their wives. When Lucien got the hot spring, friendships that had fallen into rueful desuetude came back to life. They loved him and they loved his healing waters! They parked on the white gravel, soaked and appealed for discounts on their bills. On the radio, a song spoke of one of sixteen vestal virgins heading for the coast. This is life, thought Lucien, this is the long tunnel. Down in my hot spring the women are buoyant with reproductive glee. It draws customers like flies. Cash discounts for the criminally insane.
Among Lucien’s customers were many who bore his study: a luckless parvenu, girl cowboys, environmental guides, a geothermal engineer who told Lucien what was wrong with his hot spring, how it would dry up, etc., a Hindu, a jockey named “Mincemeat,” and so on. There was a gangster retired to his Madonna collection and prayer. On Saturday night in the bathrooms next to the bar, urine’s vitreous ring was a carillon of high spirits from the happy toilets.
Lucien called Suzanne and described his success. This was going to be a wonderful summer out west.
Then Suzanne called Lucien late one night, so late that Lucien wondered momentarily where he was. He had hung a sport coat on the tall bedpost for dry-cleaning the next day; for a moment he thought the coat had placed the call to him. His bird dog stood and arched her back in a slow stretch, not anxious to start the day in the middle of the night.
“What’s up?”
“I’m sorry to be calling you so late, but I’m in such a state of confusion I can’t sleep.”
“Think nothing of it. I’ve done this to you, often and drunkenly.”
Suddenly a silence from Suzanne’s end of the line was filled with sobbing. Lucien pulled himself up against the bedstead and waited alertly for her to recover. “What is it?” he asked. “Suzanne, what is it?”
“Lucien, I don’t know. I’m going in circles. I’m worn out trying to work and stay ahead of James and I’m just absolutely going in circles. And I miss you. Suddenly you’re strong and I’m a mess.”
Lucie
n ached sharply. He missed Suzanne too; but maybe he just missed their old hopes, now long in the past.
“What can I do?” Lucien asked. “I’ll do absolutely anything.”
“Don’t hang up on me.”
“I won’t hang up on you.”
“There. I think I’m better.”
“Haven’t you met anyone nice yet?”
“Oh, sure. They’re everywhere. And you?”
“Well, you know all about the Emily thing,” Lucien gasped. “After that I pretty much concentrated on staying fluid, you know. The old moving target trick.”
“Target. You’re darn lucky you didn’t turn into one while she was still there.”
“That’ll be enough of that, Suzanne. This time I mean it.”
“I’m sorry,” she said miserably. Lucien turned the light back off and sat in the dark once again with the silent telephone. They could have been in the same room.
“Why don’t you pick up and come out here for a while?”
“I don’t know. I’ve got relatives all over the place there.”
“Please.”
“You come up with a presentable plan and we’ll see.”
This was the Suzanne Lucien remembered best. Touching, emotional, sweet and predacious. When she hung up, he lay there used and overjoyed. He could barely get back to sleep. There was moonlight. But when he awakened in the morning he was nervous and didn’t want breakfast.
Lucien was doing something very acceptable to everyone: he was making money hand over fist. He wasn’t quite certain why this had such a miraculous effect on his self-esteem. After all, the same old battered soul still lived inside the groomed monster Lucien felt he had become. It didn’t even arouse his cynicism. I have to admit, he thought, they all like me better now that I am a rich SOB. And some of the hollow feeling had gone, too. It was strange not to be desperate. In fact, he rather missed desperation now that it was gone. It had been an old friend and had produced some top fireworks. Lucien knew, though, that he had been allowed to make mankind’s favorite experiment, that of going from some form of rags to some form of riches, overnight. Only he was plagued by the questions: Am I a new man? Why do they like me? Am I secretly the same old shitheel, the same old wino from hell who brought down hurricanes of scorn on himself? Is this an American dream?
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